Small Business Marketing Tip

Here’s a simple marketing tip for small businesses (or bigger businesses, too) if you use a cash register.

Make your cash register make your cash register ring more.

What?

No, that’s not a typo.  Your cash register can help you make more sales.

How?

Well, it’s pretty simple.  Most modern cash registers allow you to customize what appears on the receipt.  If your cash register looks like the one in the picture below, sorry, you’re probably not going to benefit much from this tip.  Otherwise, read on:

Most businesses, probably over 90% of them, just have the basic information on their receipts, if they’ve even customized the receipts at all.

That means:

Company name, address, and phone number.  Some will add their company’s website URL to the receipt, but most don’t even do this.

But what if you took one extra step that resulted in even 1% of your customers coming back one more time per month?  How much would your annual sales increase?

It’s simple.  Add a sentence to your cash register receipt that says “Join our FREE Discount Newsletter” or something like that.  Then have an email or a website page where they can sign up.  Then once they subscribe, send them special offers for the next time they shop.  Coupons, closeout deals, clearance, regular sales, whatever.

I’m typing this at a Starbucks location, and as effective as they are at marketing, THEY aren’t even doing this.  No facebook fan page, no twitter handle, not even a website URL on their receipt.

Of course not every customer is going to even pay attention to the receipt, let alone sign up, but some percentage will.

First, you’ll need an email autoresponder. I recommend (and use) AWeber, but there are lots of others out there – Constant Contact, MailChimp, and so on.

For the many of you that don’t know what an autoresponder is, it is an email subscription management program that allows you to email lots of people at once, and allows them to subscribe to your email list, newsletter, etc.  We’ll cover more on that in a later blog post.

Then decide on how often you’re going to send out emails to your list. Add a task to your calendar to set up an email to go out regularly.  Weekly is good for a retail store – maybe more often for really special deals or events. But weekly is a good start.  Most shoppers are used to seeing weekly deals in the newspaper, online, and so on.

It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to go out. So try it out – test it, and see if it makes a difference in your business.  You already know that there are 2 ways to increase your sales per customer: have them buy more per visit, and have them buy more often.  This can help you encourage them to buy  more often.  I hope it helps!

We’ll cover more email marketing tips and small business marketing ideas in later posts to this blog, so be sure to subscribe, add it to your favorites, and share it with other business owners who could benefit from getting more customers and getting customers to buy more often.

And if you need help setting up your email marketing campaign, W3 Group can help.  Just contact us at 404-669-6682 or email info at AtlantaSEOs.com.

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(FTC Disclaimer: some links in this blog are affiliate links and may result in a referral or commission paid to W3 group if you purchase a product.  It doesn’t increase your price any.)